Newtonian Physics of Ever After
by wizened cynic
Summary: Happily ever after depends on how you look at it. LukeGrace. [Complete]
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** Characters belong to Barbara Hall. Mistakes are all mine. Pineapples are dedicated to Artemis Rain.

**Warning:** snarky kidfic ahead

**Notes:** This is a stupid cracked-up fic I wrote one night, as an apology for never updating my College!Grace series. To the person who has to keep thinking of new names to leave reviews, if you're reading this--- I'm sorry that I'm causing so much angst! And I will update soon . . . I hope. Um, this is mostly AU after Common Thread, and sort of co-exists in my College!Grace universe.

Lastly, I am not personally responsible for any diabetic reactions caused by the reading of the following material.

* * *

When I was eleven years old, my best friend Jeremy came over to my house under the pretense of doing homework, and over a bag of Doritos and several worksheets on the life cycle of the amoeba, we discussed the failure of his sixteen-year-old sister's marriage. While Jeremy was a hopeless romantic, I held a more cynical viewpoint and quickly pointed out that they were sixteen, hello, who really expected it to work out? 

Jeremy, who had read one too many romance novels, replied, "Well, it worked out for your parents, didn't it? Weren't they childhood sweethearts? Found their true love at sixteen?"

"Not so loud, retard," I said, looking over to see if my mother had been paying attention to what we were saying. She had not; she was deeply engaged in writing whatever she wrote, we were never allowed to ask. "My mom could hear you. God, do you have a death wish?"

Even at a young age, I knew better than to use the words "true love" and "childhood sweethearts" within my mother's vicinity. If it were up to my mother to describe her marriage to my father, it would be something along the lines of, "During a moment of impaired judgment, I fell victim to the oppressive patriarchy that governs our social norms. But I wore leather, just to make a point."

If I asked my father, he would lapse into stuttery scientific language, coming up with analogies about neurological impulses and the physics of human emotion, often beginning with his ninth-grade science fair and concluding with a wide, irrepressible grin, the one that made Jeremy fall in love with him at the age of five.

(When we were about eight years old, Jeremy and I had this conversation:

Jeremy: If your mom dies, I'm going to marry your dad.  
Me: My mom isn't going to die. Ever.  
Jeremy: Well, if your parents get divorced . . .  
Me: You're an asshole.

I was unjustly punished for using inappropriate language, and when I related this incident to my mother, she remarked, "It's cool that Jeremy is so comfortable with his sexuality. At least we know the idiot teachers at your school are doing _something_ right.")

I've never gone right out to ask my parents the details of how they ended up together, because I am not inquisitive by nature, and because to me, it doesn't matter _how_ they ended up together, what matters is that they did. Nevertheless, throughout the years, I have gathered bits and pieces from relatives and friends and my parents themselves, enough for me to give a rather accurate account of their story.

"Well," I usually begin, "they met in Chemistry class. And then they built a gun. And then they had a contract, which my mother burned for my dad's sixteenth birthday. And then they broke up because my mother was going to college and long-distance relationships never work. And then my dad went to college, like, next door to my mom and they got back together, after my dad bailed my mom out of jail. She was arrested for political protest. Then they broke up again, and my dad dated this FBI agent, who got shot and then dumped him. I'm not sure if the two incidents are related. My mom was dating this really creepy guy for a while. Now he works on Wall Street. Anyway, my parents stayed in touch and tried to be friends, and then they had save my aunt Joan from an arranged marriage with a member of the Yakuza. After that, everyone decided that they should just stay together from then on, because when they're apart, the universe spirals out of control. Eventually, they got married. In Canada. It was a spur of the moment thing and for a long time nobody knew except Joan, who almost lost the wedding pictures in Lichtenstein."

Most people think there should be a requisite "and they lived happily ever after" at this point, but my mother would disapprove. This is not to say that they didn't live happily ever after, however, and they've certainly lived to a point where they no longer need complete thoughts and proper nouns in order to have an argument.

Mom: Can you get that thing? Like, tomorrow?  
Dad: Huh?  
Mom: You know. (deep, annoyed sigh) The thing.  
Dad: How would I know? What thing?  
Mom: The thing, the damn ---  
Dad: I don't know what --- never mind, I will  
Mom: God, you really --- oh, shut up, I'll just do it myself.

You know, they are doing pretty good, even if I say so myself.

* * *

Neither of my parents remained close to their immediate families after high school. They were the type of people who visited home for the occasional Christmas or Passover, and kept little contact otherwise. My grandmother Helen called perhaps once every seven months or so, and usually only because she had dialed the wrong number. My mom's father, the Rabbi, called once in a while, and Mom would talk to him sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in English, most of the time with a mixture of annoyance and something that looks a little like longing. All in all, my parents kept to themselves and if any news needed to be shared, my aunt Joan was usually the messenger.

You must understand that Joan is not the most reliable source of information. She has the attention span of a toddler with ADHD, and frequently forgets to mention things until years after the fact. For this reason, my Grandma Helen did not discover my existence till after I've been living with my parents for almost a year.

According to my father, who was watching me that day, I had answered the phone, and the following conversation ensued.

Grandma: Hello?  
Me: Hi.  
Grandma: Who's this?  
Me: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Daddy.  
Grandma: Hello?  
Dad: (to me) Who are you talking to? Oh, hey, it's your grandma! (to Grandma) Hi, Mom.  
Grandma: Who was that?  
Dad: Oh, that was the baby.  
Grandma: YOU HAVE A BABY?  
Dad: Well, she's not a _baby_. She's three.  
Grandma: She's three? Why didn't you tell me Grace was pregnant?  
Dad: What? Grace's not pregnant. Grace's never been pregnant. Wait, didn't Joan tell you?  
Grandma: Tell me what?

By the end of the week, my mother's side of the family joined in the confusion, and soon after, a FedEx box appeared on our doorstep, containing a small pink sweater and a pair of socks from Baby Gap, gifts from my other set of grandparents.

My mother, despite being somewhat amused by the whole situation, demanded that the box be returned, as she hated Baby Gap and there _was_ no baby who could be dressed in said Baby Gap. Unfortunately, our slightly deranged cat, Rasputin, had chewed up one of the socks and my dad said, "Well, we can't return it now."

So we kept the sweater for my cross-dressing plush penguin, Isaac, and my parents sent a memo to existing friends and family and foe explaining that, (a) there is no baby, but (b) there is a three-year-old they adopted internationally, (c) no, they didn't do it just because Angelina Jolie did, and if she gets compared to Angelina Jolie one more time, Grace is going to _kick your ass_, (d) Joan, seriously, what the hell did you tell them, and lastly (f) the kid is great, she likes Cheerios, she knows the first ten digits of Pi, and she is a registered Democrat.

Members of my extended family were not strangers to such confusion. Not long before the mix-up regarding my arrival, there was another mix-up, this one having to do with my parents' nuptials.

Now the story of my parents' non-existent Canadian wedding is best told by Joan, who happened to be one of the few people present at the time. According to my aunt, my parents were in Montreal, attending the wedding of one of my mother's college friends. Joan tagged along, as Joan is wont to do, and after a hideously boring ceremony and a hideously boring reception, the newlyweds threw an afterparty that was reminiscent of their college days, complete with debates about politically-correct references to different cultural foods ("Dammit, Ben, of course _gyoza_ is not a politically-correct term. How can it be politically-correct? It's not politically _anything_, it's a pan-fried dumpling.").

After a few amaretto sours, everything became delightfully blurred around the edges for my aunt, and at one point she said, "God, I love this place. I want to marry this place. No, wait, you know what would be cool? If you two got married at this place."

So now you know the truth. My parents got married because a crazy, drunken woman told them to.

"Come on," Joan begged. "For my birthday?"

"It's almost five months until your birthday. And besides, your birthday? What kind of a reason is that to give in to the misogynistic demands of our patriarchal society?"

"It's a valid reason!"

"Am I going to have a say in this?" asked my father. "Certainly getting married as Joan's birthday present is not exactly the way I planned ---"

"Dude, you've _planned_?"

"Grace, it's been ten years. I like to plan! I like to be precise!"

"I'd better not be barefoot and pregnant in any one of your plans or I'll ---"

"Listen to him, Grace!" Joan said. "It's been ten years. You guys have been together forever. I mean, don't you think it's time you made it official? Please, please get married. Terrible things happen when you two aren't together. _People get shot_."

"You are insane." Mom ignored her and turned to my father. "Don't you like what we have right now?"

"Well," Dad said. "I'm okay with it. I mean, if you're okay with it. Obviously Joan is not okay with it, but she'll probably have no recollection of this in the morning."

My mother said nothing for the rest of the night. At around five in the morning, she woke my dad and told him, "I'm keeping my name. And I'm not wearing a dress."

My dad smiled so bright, my mom said that fucking rosy-fingered dawn was no competition for him.

They were married the next day ("But not in Niagara Falls, because Niagara Falls is tacky," my aunt noted), partly because my mom has always liked to do things quickly, before too much reason can kick in, but mostly because my parents were afraid Joan would change her mind and ask for something expensive for her birthday, like a bulldozer. ("Why would I want a bulldozer?" "I don't know, Girardi. You do weird things.")

It was a small ceremony, with both a priest and a rabbi, and my mother did end up wearing a dress, but she agreed to do so only if she could wear her leather jacket over it.

Joan was in charge of the photographs, so all and any wedding pictures were on her camera. Nobody thought much of that at the time, the sudden newness of everything having stunned them all. A few days later, Joan flew to Lichtenstein on another one of her strange missions, and through a scratchy postcard with no return address, she informed her parents of the impromptu wedding.

Minutes later, Helen Girardi called, furious that she had not been invited or even notified, and demanding to see pictures.

"They're on Joan's camera," my dad said.

My grandmother moaned. "You let _Joan_ take the pictures?"

"I know Joan isn't the best photographer, but it's not like she will lose them or anything."

Which was precisely what Joan did. When she returned from Lichtenstein a few weeks later, she was confronted by my zealous grandparents, and her only response was, "Oh, crap."

So my parents were forced to tell others that sorry, they couldn't show them any wedding pictures because the pictures were probably at some Kodak station in continental Europe. My mother was pleased by this turn of events, because she has always hated being photographed, and the idea of having pictures of herself being circulated among the gossipmongers of Arcadia made her contemplate mass murder.

The wedding pictures finally resurfaced by the time I graduated from kindergarten. Aunt Joan came to the ceremony, because she wanted to get a glimpse of my teacher, a former model for Abercrombie and Fitch, despite my mother's constant reminders that he was impossibly, irreversibly gay.

Joan snapped numerous pictures of Mr. Abercrombie and several of me, looking small and miserable, somewhat out of place in pigtails and a Che Guevara T-shirt. When she developed the photos a few days later, she discovered that the roll of film has been in her camera for a very long time.

"I found your wedding pictures," she announced happily as she stopped by for lunch.

I was five years old, and had little concept of time. But I distinctly remember my dad saying that it was "like going past the speed of light and traveling backwards in time." That roll of film spanned the ages, starting with me in my kindergarten cap and gown, and ending with a panoroma shot of a row of pineapples, which Joan remembered taking, but could not for the life of her remember why. It was difficult to pinpointexactly when certain pictures had been taken, so we tried to discern the time by observing my grandmother's hairstyles and whichever girlfriend my uncle Kevin had his arm around.

Only one of the wedding pictures met my mother's approval. "Well, I don't _like_ it --- just wait a second, okay?" she said as I grabbed onto her legs and reached up fora look. "But at least we don't look like dumbasses or have to share limelight with Joan's thumb."

I studied the picture for a minute, then gave it back to my mother. It was not interesting. My parents were my parents, and they looked exactly as I'd known them. I went back to eating my lunch, and when my mother wasn't looking, I put all my olives on Joan's plate.

My dad keeps the wedding picture on his desk, in his study. My parents are not the kind of people who hang blown-up portraits in their living room, displaying their wedded bliss to the world. Besides, the centerpiece in our living room is unarguably my mother's collection of Samurai swords.

From time to time, when I visit my father's study, I look at that picture. It is strange, to see my parents in their life before me, but it is also comforting, because I can see traces of who they were in who they've become.

In the photograph, my father is looking intently at my mother, "grinning like a stupid dork," as Mom would say. As always, my mother is staring back at him, maybe even glaring; on some days, it seems like she is scowling, on others, it seems like she is smiling.


	2. Chapter 2

**AN:** This madness does not end. Um, there are some inherent problems with the POV I've chosen to write this in (I do stupid shit like write myself into a corner) so you're just going to have to pretend that the Nameless Narrator (Jenny --- she doesn't have a name yet, but I have a good idea of which mathematician she's going to be named after) knows all of this because God told her. Dude, seriously, this is _babyfic_, I think that itself is more screwed up than my narrative devices. Honestly, why the hell are you reading this?

As always, for Artemis Rain, my beloved IR, my awesome beta-woman, the silly fool who opened up this can of worms and then offered me crack so that I'd continue.

* * *

To my parents, getting married was no big deal. For others, it might have been a life-altering affair, a watershed event that separated Before from After. Of course, for others it probably involved a lot more than my aunt Joan's spur-of-the-moment suggestion. 

My parents had been together forever by the time they finally got married, so if you think about it, not much had changed. They exchanged vows, got a piece of paper certifying their marriage (written in both English and French), took the dead-of-night flight back home, and hauled themselves out of bed the next morning to continue their indentured servitude to their post-graduate institutions of choice. Before and After were, in essence, the same, and the only difference was my grandmother Helen's sudden insistence that they buy proper silverware.

According to legend, Grandma Helen had been miffed that my parents wouldn't throw a _real_ wedding, one that family and friends could actually attend, where pictures were taken by professional photographers and not Joan. When she finally got over it, she decided nevertheless to offer her youngest child and rebel daughter-in-law an elaborate wedding gift, perhaps to remind them of what they had denied her.

For this reason, one afternoon my father came home to find my mother on the verge of ripping the phone from the wall and hurling it out the window. When Dad asked her what was the source of all this agitation, Mom said irritably, "Your mother is _imposing_ kitchenware on us."

Despite that most people registered for gifts _before_ the wedding, my grandmother thought my parents could break convention and do it now, weeks after the fact, so that family and friends could buy them necessary household appliances.

"That sounds like absolute torture," my mother said.

"It's not that bad," assured my aunt Joan. "Just go to Pottery Barn and talk to the lady at the registry office. Think about it. You can force people to buy you stuff. How awesome is that?"

"Yeah, that's just great. Pottery Barn, the ninth circle of yuppie hell. I can't wait."

"I find it interesting that these are the same people who wouldn't help us with our student loans," my father observed, "but the minute we get married, they're more than happy to buy us a breadmaker."

To appease my grandparents, my parents eventually got around to making the trip to the registry office. They were in need of proper dinnerware anyway, seeing as that their apartment was overstuffed with books and computer parts, but not much else. They ate take-out on a milk crate, and no two pieces of their cutlery matched.

The woman in charge, a deadringer for Gertrude Stein, handed my father the barcode scanner and told my parents to register for whatever they wanted. "Remember," she said, "for better or for worse, these things are going to be with you for_ the rest of your lives_," which did not register confidence in my parents at all.

"Don't worry, we have a great selection of everything," Gertrude continued. "Bedding and linens are over there. We have these wonderful 300-thread count sheets, made from 100 Egyptian cotton ---"

"By nine-year-olds working for two cents an hour in the Philippines," my mother muttered.

"What's that?" Gertrude asked. "To your left is the dinnerware section. We have a lovely collection of flatware. Would you like to look at the Limoges?"

My father was aghast. Earlier that morning he had eaten scrambled eggs off a plastic plate that had Spongebob stenciled in the middle. Owning formal china made him feel as though he were suddenly old enough to draw social security.

"And here, look at this set of salad bowls. They're made from teak, which is the hardest wood in the world. Very hard to come by these days, you know."

"That's because you people are destroying rainforests and chopping down trees to make these stupid bowls!" Mom was a couple dinner forks away from jamming salad tongs down the woman's throat.

Gertrude Stein left my parents alone to wander around and mostly be abhorred by the number of things they didn't need.

"Grace, do you think we need lobster tail forks to eat Kung Pow chicken straight out of the container?" my dad mused aloud.

"As much as we need a silver platter to serve Doritos. Seriously, I swear this is the same one they put John the Baptist's head on."

My father, like most males, was itching to use the barcode scanner, which Gertrude had called "the gun." He said, "Come on, let's find something we can both live with. I want to try this thing out."

"Maybe we should register for _that_."

Four hours later, my parents left the store, having registered for exactly one set of refrigerator magnets and a bagel slicer. Later, my mother told Joan to convey the message that the best gift of all is for everybody to leave them alone. Committing to each other for the rest of their lives was quick and painless for my parents, but getting the dinnerware sure was a bitch.

You'd think my relatives would learn from that experience. You'd really think they would.

Unfortunately, this is my family we're talking about.

By the time both sets of my grandparents discovered my existence, they had already missed my birthday. So they decided to make up for lost time when December rolled around and commenced what my mother called "the month-long celebration of self-indulgent materialism and exploitation of organized religion."

My grandparents were under the misguided belief that, as a grandchild, I would change everything and make it all better. I would erase history; I would allow, if not compel, my father to overlook all those forgotten birthdays, my mother to forgive the innumerable times she'd woken up to her mother enjoying early-morning screwdrivers. My grandparents thought that once my parents had a child themselves, they would keep in touch with a little more than semi-annual emails and hurried phone calls that revolved around the discussion of weather. This meant they routinely looted Gymboree and Toys R Us, hoping to buy mine and my parents' love with satin dresses and Lego sets. (The clothes my mom didn't like, possibly because they weren't black, but the toys my dad and I had fun with.)

My grandparents also made certain that I was being properly introduced to my different religious backgrounds. My grandma sent us an Advent calendar, the instructions of which we completely ignored. We finished all the chocolate in three days, and when Helen pestered us about a Christmas tree, my mother told her that she wasn't about to hack down another tree just to decorate it with glitter balls, because isn't there enough global warming already? ("I think we should still have a tree. It doesn't have to be a real tree." My dad, being Italian, liked festivity and my mom conceded after he presented her with a persuasive argument, complete with legal precedents.)

The Rabbi called each of the eight nights of Hanukkah to make sure we were lighting the menorah and saying the right prayers, ignoring Mom when she pointed out that Hanukkah is nothing but an overblown commercialist construct created by North Americans that Jews don't even really celebrate in Israel.

"Are you spinning the dreidel?" my grandfather asked, when he overheard my dad calling out, "Grace, it's your turn!"

"Sure," answered my mother, when in fact we were playing Duck Hunt. My uncle Kevin had sent the best gift of all; to my parents, he had given the original Nintendo system that he and Dad and Aunt Joan had owned as children, along with a whole box of game cartridges.

(Just in case you were wondering, my parents didn't completely overlook my religious education. They told me a politically-correct and uncensored version of the stories behind the holidays, complete with persecution and Herod killing babies and Saint Nicholas looking more like the Pope than the jolly, robust man decked out in red at the mall.)

Around the second week of December, the UPS guy, who by then was on a first-name basis with my parents, brought forth a large, heavy package, a gift from my parents' childhood friend, Adam Rove. It was a plastic easel, with some assembly required, and the minute I saw it among the disgusting pile of all my other gifts, I knew I wanted it. To my mother's dismay, I had been sucked into the soulless void of consumerism --- I liked my toys big, bright and expensive. Ergo, to me, it was the best present in the world; to my parents, it was the biggest pain in the ass.

"What is _wrong_ with Rove?" my mother hissed. "He has a kid. He _knows_ it's a bitch to put these things together."

A word of advice to all: do not send toys that require assembly to new parents, unless you are also sending them a person who can do the required assembly.

My parents put off building the stupid easel until the very last minute. I spent Christmas Eve ricocheting off the walls from sugar-induced hypomania before finally passing out on the couch from a combination of exhaustion and gluttony.

With me out of the way, my parents seized the opportunity for what I will heretofore call "Grownup Time". (Use your imagination, but spare me the imagery.) My father had planned everything out beforehand, having written out a structured timetable after calculating time, duration, and the probability of my waking up or the cat getting in the way.

However, things veered off course when Grownup Time was extended by two hours, and around one in the morning, my parents discovered that, for all they understood, the instructions that came with the easel might as well have been written in German.

My father tried to decipher the strange code by looking at the diagrams, but quickly lost patience and began hammering with vicious fervor. "I once built a fully-functioning rail gun," he fumed. "I've helped construct a gamma ray telescope that won several national awards. I refuse to believe that I cannot figure out this stupid Fisher-Price piece of crap."

"I'm going to kill Rove," my mother said repeatedly. "Good intentions, sure, but what the hell was he thinking?"

(My mother exacted her revenge several months later, when Adam's daughter, Elizabeth, had her birthday. Mom bought her an electronic drum set that made a million annoying noises, ranging from ambulance sirens to something that sounded like a lunatic pounding on a keyboard. It was bound to lead to the destruction of Western civilization. My mother had never been happier than when she shipped it off, and for four months, until the batteries wore out, Adam never had a moment's peace.)

After a few beers and a sack of stale chocolate coins, my parents gave up altogether and began to find the situation mildly hilarious. I would get over it, they decided. I always did. As did all three-year-olds, I possessed the capacity to adore my parents in spite of their constant idiocy and, moreover, the attention span equivalent to that of a fruitfly. Whether or not I would complain about this incident twenty years down the road to my therapist, well, that was another question.

They carried on to talk about whatever parents talk about when their children are asleep, except in my parents' case, it probably involved a lot of Euclidian geometry and criticism of France's foreign policy. Somewhere along the line, both of them dozed off on the living room floor, and that was how I found them when I woke up on Christmas morning: my darling fools, two silly, snoring toys fast asleep at my feet.


	3. Chapter 3

**AN:** To the five people who are reading this --- thanks for the kind feedback, and keep smoking that crack. As a person with a penchant for killing puppies, I am rather dedicated to kidfic. This will end soon, I promise.

Also, I'm stuck in a skanky part of Asia right now. I haven't the first clue about geography of the northeastern United States, or how the transit system works in Boston. Please excuse any discrepancies, and focus on the fact that this is pure insanity.

* * *

As far as I'm concerned, one of the true advantages of being adopted is that I can easily pretend my parents have never actually had sex. The fact that my parents were not wont to engage in public displays of affection allowed me to live in blissful denial for at least the first ten years of my life. 

Even as a child, I was aware of how different my mom and dad were compared to my friends' and classmates' parents. While other parents used terms of endearment like "honey" and "sweetheart," my mom was still insisting on referring to Dad by his last name. (I can count on two hands the number of times Mom actually called Dad "Luke," and if my mother ever calls anyone "sweetie," chances are she probably means "dumbass.") Other parents went to Aruba or someplace tropical for their anniversaries, bought each other flowers and chocolates on Valentine's Day, went to marriage counseling to bitch at each other in front of a certified professional. My parents went to math conventions or environmental rallies (depending on who owed whom a favor at the time), refused to partake any event involving the Hallmark-Manufactured Manipulation of Catholic Saints and Greek Mythology, and didn't require the presence of a certified professional to bitch at each other.

All of this caused me a lot of grief and worry when I was ten. At the time, more than half of my friends were being shuffled in and out of therapy as their parents went through divorce procedures, and my parents' lack of a conventional married couple-type relationship convinced me that they were doomed.

When my mother's birthday arrived that year, I suggested to my dad that he should give her something a little more romantic than what he gave her last year, a jar of frogs preserved in formaldehyde. "Can't you do something spontaneous and romantic?" I asked him.

"It doesn't go over well with your mother," he said.

"Have you ever even tried?" In my head I could already see myself in court, having to choose which parent to live with. I was halfway toward a gold membership to the Divorced Kids Club.

My father looked up from the chemistry lab he was marking, and tried very hard not to cringe. "I don't really want to talk about this right now," he told me, which totally meant he'd tried, and whatever happened had probably resulted in catastrophe.

I went to my aunt Joan for more details, and learned of what my uncle Kevin calls, "the longest and most unsuccessful booty call in recorded history."

"The timeline's a little sketchy," Joan said, "what with the two of them constantly breaking up and getting back together and all. Are you sure you want to know this?"

The correct answer would have been, "No, not really," but morbid curiosity got the better of me.

"Let's see. It was Luke's senior year which means that Grace and I were freshmen at college. Your mom's birthday was on a weekend that year, and so your dad thought it would be a good idea to drive up and visit her. You know, like, _visit_."

"Ewwwww." I made a face, and then added as an afterthought, "Mom's going to kill him. She hates cars and global warming."

"Oh, wait till you hear the rest of this."

My dad had recently bought his first car. Aptly dubbed "the Polluter," it was nothing more than a beat-up aluminum bucket on wheels. Nevertheless, it was all his, and he'd had to work as a lab assistant at a pharmaceutical company for little more than slave wages in order to pay for it. He was so proud of it that he couldn't wait to show my mom, so on the eve of her birthday, he skipped his last class and embarked on an eight-hour drive up to my mother's college.

Somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, he called her and told her he was coming. And she said, "Dude, I'm in the middle of freaking midterms. I barely have a chance to blow my nose. I don't have time to entertain you."

"But I'm almost there," Dad said, even though he had no idea where he was exactly.

"Fine." My mother sighed. "What time will you get here?"

"Around midnight?"

"I'll prop the door open with my Psych text. Maybe you can step on my roommate on your way in."

Loaded on caffeine and Sun Chips, my dad continued his journey. Traffic was heavier than he had calculated, and after being stuck behind a semi for an hour and a half, his mild neurosis escalated into full-blown panic. By the time he arrived at my mom's dorm, it was well after two-thirty, and after finding the correct room, he uttered, "Hey, Grace," and promptly collapsed at the foot of my mother's bed.

The next morning, he woke up to find a Post It stuck to his cheek. "Psych exam in the morning," it said. "Ethics seminar after that. Find you later. Don't mess anything up."

Now, my mother's note had told him specifically not to mess anything up, but didn't say anything about wandering around campus, so my father did just that. He stumbled his way through various buildings and somehow ended up crashing a math competition, which he was invited to write.

Several hours later, he returned to the dorm to find my mother on the brink of homicide. "Where the hell were you?" she yelled. "I skipped my seminar so that we could have lunch. I came back, and you weren't here!"

"Okay, don't get mad," my dad began. It was not the first time he had said this, and it certainly would not be the last. "But I kind of got distracted by a math contest."

And as if that didn't piss my mother off enough, he continued, "I did really well on the first round, so, uh, I have to write the second round tomorrow."

That killed whatever my mother had been in the mood for, and after calling him a loser, she threw him out and left him to sleep in the car. "It's the coldest March in the last fifty years," my dad protested.

"Well, I guess you can cuddle up with your soulmate, Pythagoras," my mom said, and slammed her door shut. (I look at this objectively: my father had driven several hundred miles in a machine that was actively depleting the ozone layer, and then he opted for probability theorem and Markov chains over an afternoon with my mother. I'm surprised that Mom actually let him _live_.)

My mother felt sorry for him after a while, so during a study break, she went down to the parking lot and brought him a bunch of her extra blankets.

"Should I skim the next part?" Joan said at this point.

"God, _please_," I answered. I didn't even want to consider the possibilities.

As it turned out, my dad not only went to the math contest the next day, he actually _won_ it. He was awarded an invitation to write another math contest, as well as enough cash to pay for a one-way ticket back to Arcadia, which he decided to use, seeing as that he had already stretched the limits of my mother's patience.

"Yeah, but what about the car?" Dad asked. "I guess you can drive it back when you come home in a month or so."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Mom might be willing to partake in physical activity in the backseat of a fossil fuel-guzzling, nitric acid-spouting vehicle, but she sure as hell wasn't going to drive it.

In the end, they decided to keep the Polluter at the house of my mom's friend, Ben. It would be a temporary arrangement; Dad was going to MIT in September anyway, and he could pick up his car then. "Take as long as you want," Ben said cheerily. He came from old money, and he delighted in torturing his family by associating with what they called his "middle-classfriends." So they kept my father's piece of junk metal in the garage of Ben's mansion, sandwiched between two Rolls Royces.

When my dad finally went to college the following semester, he discovered that it was simply easier to take public transit. The Red Line brought him from his campus to my mother's in less than ten minutes, and the gas prices were so high by then it was economically preferable to travel by foot. Eventually everybody forgot about the Polluter, and it was only mentioned in passing whenever somebody said at a family gathering, "Remember the time Luke surprised Grace for her birthday and ended up winning that math contest?"

I often wonder whatever happened to my father's beloved vehicle. Did somebody else end up claiming ownership of it, or did it end up in the junkyard, where my mother claims it rightfully belonged? I try to imagine Ben's aristocratic, upper-crust parents, coming home from a trip to Switzerland or some other unaffordable country in Europe, opening the door to their garage and seeing the Polluter there, that little lump of scrap metal, and wondering where it had come from, or what, if at all, it had to do with anybody's life.

* * *

After hearing Joan's story, I understood that it was probably for the better if Dad never did anything spontaneous and romantic again, ever. Weeks passed and my paranoia wore off --- when you are ten years old, you have better things to worry about, like long division. After all, my parents had known each other for two decades, and so far there had been no bloodshed. I had a pretty good idea that they would carry on with their bickering until theywere beyond the grave. 

Thanks to my mother, I was made aware early on of the erroneous depiction of love in the movies. Under the disguise of saccharine romantic comedies and such, the general public is mislead into believing that love involves circumstances like committing joint suicide with your boyfriend because your parents won't let you go to the prom together, or running into a four-alarm fire to save your lover, who's locked up at the top of a penthouse.

(During the height of my divorce obsession, I once asked my father if he'd rescue my mother from a burning building.

Dad: Why is the building burning in the first place?  
Me: I don't know. It just is.  
Dad: Is it an accident, or did somebody set it on fire?  
Me: What difference does it make?  
Dad: Our insurance doesn't cover arson. Also, is it a dry fire or an oil fire? Or is it spontaneous combustion? Remember what I taught you about combustion?  
Me: Oh, just forget it. (stomps off to write an essay titled "Why Are Men So Stupid?")  
Dad: Grace, listen to this. You won't believe what the kid just asked me.  
Mom: (when she finally stops laughing) Yeah, like you can really save me from a burning building.

Sometimes, it's painfully obvious that my parents adopted me just for comic relief.)

In many ways, romantic comedies are much more hazardous than, say, blood-drenched horror flicks with predatory aliens or cannibalistic serial killers. The latter is so far removed from reality that the audience knows it's fiction; the former, however, manipulates us into believing this idealized notion of romance transcends into real life.

In reality, love is not so much about big, sweeping circumstances as it is about all the small, irritating things you deal with, even if you don't have a good reason to; you do it because you can't _not_. It involves people wearing each other down until all the rough spots are smooth, likethe jumble of rocks thrown into the barrel of the jewelry-maker I got for my birthday when I was seven.

It's putting up with stupid shit you wouldn't put up with otherwise, as my mother would say, and I still recall her picking me up half an hour early from Andrea Gallagher's sixth birthday party so that we could catch the end of Dad's lecture on bosonic string theories. When Andrea's mother asked why, my mom rolled her eyes and said, "We have to go and clap in case nobody else does." The other parents nodded in understanding; they, too, had spouses who are professors, boring as hell keynote speakers, compulsive nerds in each their own way.

Really, I think this is the only logical way to explain how my parents haven't yet killed one another, or me, since we spend such a great deal of our lives grating on each other's nerves.

Case in point, my parents and I had a fight of gargantuan proportions when I was in fifth grade, over Valentine's Day. That year, I had decided to give into peer pressure and distribute store-bought valentines to my classmates. My mom considered this the beginning of the destruction of my soul, whereas my dad thought it was kind of cute.

Halfway through the class list, I realized that I should have just listened to my mother and skipped the insipid ritual. Valentine-writing, I discovered, was a tedious and repetitive chore.

"I hate this," I whined after scribbling "Happy Valentine's Day" for the eighteenth time.

"Told you," said my mother, who, as usual, was not very sympathetic to my plight. "It's a big corporate plot and you ran right into it."

"Hey, I don't mind writing to the people I actually like. I just don't want to write one for everybody."

"Why do you have to write them to everybody?"

"It's in the stupid rules." I showed my mother the sheet of instructions the teacher had given me. It stated clearly that if I were to give out valentines, I was to make sure that everybody in the class got one. Nobody was to receive special treatment, and nobody was to be excluded.

I could see my mom's blood pressure rising as she read it. "This is one step away from communism. Why are you doing this anyway?"

Back then, I was young and impressionable, and naive enough not to be aware that everything I said to my parents would inevitably be used against me later. "Because I heard from Jeremy who heard from Andrea who heard from her brother who's on the soccer team with Timothy Park that Timothy Park likes me and he's going to give me a card tomorrow and tell me that he likes me. So, if I want to tell him that I like him back, I have to give him a valentine and if I have to give him one, I have to give everybody one. It's very stressful."

My parents stared at me in open-mouthed horror. Dad spoke first, "Who's this Timothy person?"

"You can't beat him up, Dad," I told him. "He's a jock."

"Wait, so you're completely selling yourself out and giving up all the values we've ever tried to teach you for a guy?" Mom asked.

"Yep," I said, nodding earnestly. Luckily, even after eight years, my mother had not yet disowned me for my lack of common sense. Instead, she had come to regard anything that came out of my mouth as an endless source of entertainment.

"No wonder corporate oppressors have given up on teenagers and are heading straight for middle-schoolers," my mother remarked.

I grew tired of writing and handed the job over to my father. He complied, even when he was teased for having the penmanship of an eleven-year-old girl. "You don't have to do one for Topher Finley," I instructed.

"I thought the teacher said you're supposed to give one to everybody," Dad said.

"Why should she do something just because the teacher said?" said Mom.

"I don't like Topher Finley. He's a geek."

My father was offended. "Hey!"

"Sorry." I corrected myself, "He's a _mean_ geek. He sucks up to the teacher all the time, and he always tries to look at my grade when we get our tests back. He thinks he's so smart just because he can add fractions. Please, I know the quadratic formula."

"But you don't know how to use it," my dad pointed out.

"That's because it's so boring."

My father still did not graspthat appealing to my sense of moral rectitude was a lost cause. "Come on, Topher's going to feel so bad when everybody else gets these awesome valentines from you except him."

"Oh, please, they're cardboard cutouts with weird science jokes on them," Mom said, and she was right. I'd told my father to grab any old box from the drugstore, and naturally he'd come home with one that contained jokes about ionic and covalent bonding that possibly only he and Topher Finley would appreciate. "She shouldn't have to give them to anybody she doesn't want to."

"This kid is being singled out for deliberate cruelty, Grace. I can't believe you're encouraging that."

"You know, you are taking this really personally. Jesus, Geek, get over the whole third grade Tiffany Mendelbaum rejection thing."

"What Tiffany Mendelbaum rejection thing?" I asked.

My parents were too busy glaring at each other to answer me. I let them continue their feud while I finished off the rest of the cards, and by the time I headed off to bed, the fight had ceased being about my mother being cruel and heartless and my dad being overly defensive of his army of geeks, and was meandering into a dangerous zone about other trivial matters such as who was going to tell my grandparents we weren't coming down for Easter/Passover this year.

They were still at it the next morning, hiding behind respective sections of the newspaper and refusing to communicate to each other directly. For two people who were too overeducated for their own good, sometimes they had the emotional maturity of me and my friends at recess.

"Would you tell your mother that I plan to take the car to work today?" Dad asked. "Not because I don't give a shit about the environment, but because we're in the middle of a blizzard and I left my _cross-country skis_ at the office?"

My mother, in turn, said to me, "Would you tell your father that there is a brand new invention called public transit? And would you remind him that he has to pick up the dry cleaning, which he was supposed to do yesterday?"

"Would you inform your mother that I offered to pick up the dry cleaning yesterday but she made me return her overdue library books instead?"

"Would you make it clear to your father that they were actually _his_ library books, which he had borrowed using _my_ card, and therefore the overdue fines should be his responsibility? And also, ask him if he really intends on wearing that hideous sweater vest to his faculty meeting this afternoon."

"What is wrong with this sweater vest?" Dad demanded, breaking the conduit in defense of his wardrobe. "I love this sweater vest. You _gave_ me this sweater vest."

"You guys don't need me for this," I said, and went to wait for the bus downstairs. "Happy Valentine's Day," I added, and they glowered at me.

To be honest, I wasn't too worried about them. Sure, they were more stubborn and hard-headed than two metamorphic rocks, and inclined to fight to their death like Roman gladiators. They clung onto their beliefs, their moral values, whatever they thought was right, and they were as likely to back down as a couple of first-century martyrs would.

But these were the same people who understood, even if they tried to pretend it wasn't true, that they were wholly dependent on each other. That they were stuck with each other for the rest of their lives, as the bagel slicer in our kitchen cupboard could attest to. So, at some point, they had learned to wisely let it go.

And in this case, like two people truly in love, they proceeded to ignore each other for the rest of the day.


	4. Chapter 4

**AN: **This is barely fanfiction anymore. It's mostly just me futzing around.

* * *

Nobody took my parents seriously when they announced that they were going to adopt a child. To be honest, I'm not even sure if my parents took _themselves_ seriously. As with all the other important decisions they had made so far, welcoming a child into their lives was not something they had planned, but rather, something they looked back on later and said, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

My parents hadn't really told anybody other than a few close friends and neighbors, who were surprised by the sudden appearance of furniture in their apartment (apparently, the adoption agency frowns upon living conditions akin to those in a Dorothea Lange photograph). In a mad scramble for references, they'd ended up telling Joan, who laughed so hard she had to put the phone down.

"I just can't see you with a kid," she said when she finally regained composure. "Luke, sure, he's stupid about babies, but you having a baby, Grace?"

"Get with the program, Girardi," my mother said crossly, "I'm not having a _baby_. God, I hate babies. They're stupid and boring."

"See? That is exactly what I'm talking about."

"Yeah, Grace," said my father, overhearing the last part of the conversation, "you can't actually say that when the social worker comes for the homestudy."

The idea of my parents having a child was so unfathomable that Joan could scarcely believe it, even as they finally prepared to fly halfway across the world to get me. "You do realize what you're getting into, right?" Joan asked as she saw them off at the airport. "You're going to be with this kid for the rest of your life. You can't send her back when she pisses you off. You can't get rid of her even if you don't agree with her politics, or if she doesn't laugh at your non-funny science jokes. We're talking about _forever_ here. Wait, maybe I should stop talking now. Am I scaring you guys?"

As my aunt had correctly pointed out, forever is indeed a very long time, made even longer when you are spending it with someone who acted more like a manic-depressive prisoner of war than a three-year-old. Many times during my first few months of living with my parents, my mother had been on the verge of stuffing me into a FedEx box and shipping me off to live with Joan. The number of air holes punched into the box would correspond to how much I was vexing her.

In hindsight, it's a miracle that my parents and I managed to survived each other at all. I suppose some part of Joan's airport speech stayed with them, and they were fully aware that I wasn't going anywhere until I could drive. As a result, during the tenuous first few weeks, my parents regarded me not as a child, but rather a foreign-exchange student, a tenant they couldn't evict.

Somehow, my father, who had enough determination to weather igneous rocks, remained optimistic that he could wear me down and convince me to like him enough so that I would stop behaving like my mother when she was sixteen.

Playing with children requires losing a lot of your dignity. To win me over, my dad had to chase me around on all fours, recite Harold and the Purple Crayon sixty-five times a day, and accompany me in watching the mind-numbing travesty known as children's television ("How is it possible that a brontosaurus is living in the same era as a saber-tooth tiger?" he'd complain, and my mom would say, "Dude, the dinosaurs _talk_. You have a problem with the paleontology?")

My father did such an excellent job of reducing himself into a bumbling idiot that I soon came to idolize him with the doe-eyed affection of a lovelorn teenager. My mother, however, was unwilling to sink to such lows, and so our relationship remained volatile and prone to Tourettic outbursts.

My already strenuous relationship with my mother was compounded by the fact that, given six months of paid leave by the firm she was working for, we had ten hours alone with each other every single day, from the minute my father left for his thankless job of teaching hungover college students until his return in late afternoon. During these ten hours, we went to great lengths to drive each other insane. She gave up bribery and resorted to bullying when I wouldn't give her back the control for the TiVo, and if she tried to make me wear a hat when it was raining outside, I considered that a clear violation of the Geneva convention.

The minute the sun set, however, I would cling to my parents with a death grip that almost left bruises. I was deathly afraid of the dark, and getting me to sleep each night was the equivalent of invading Normandy. I refused to get into bed unless all the lights were turned on, and even then, I would not go to sleep unless my mother was holding my hand. Even at the age of three, I realized that my father might be useful when building a DNA strand out of tinkertoys, but defending me against night demons was indisputably out of his league. Any ass-kicking of monsters, imagined or otherwise, I counted on my mother to take care of.

And so my mother learned to sleep while sitting upright and clutching my hand. If she woke up in the middle of the night, she would shove me against the wall and crawl under the covers with me. But more often than not, she ended up sprawled on the floor of my bedroom, and my father would have to drape a blanket over her and then shake his head at the sudden, weird turn his life had taken.

If you really think about it, the reason why my mother and I fought so hard against each other was that we were fundamentally the same. Even now, we need to test people, slam them up against walls and make their lives difficult until they are proved to be trustworthy. We are not like Joan, who wears her emotions on her sleeves, to whom love comes easily and in abundance, like loaves and fishes. My mother and I have to be careful; we love too hard.

Once my mom and I resolved our initial differences, we got along fine. On good days, we went on excursions to the nearby park and she would name, in a less than enthused voice, everything I pointed to ("Duck. Flower. Bench. Disenchanted Harvard students smoking pot."). On days with crappy weather, we stayed inside and chilled out in front of the television, enjoying documentaries about student uprisings. I would lay my head on my mother's knee and she would scratch my back, and when Joan nagged my mom for warping my psyche by treating me like the cat, my mother would point out that she was much nicer to me than she was to the cat. (This is true. My mother hated Rasputin, and the only interaction she had with him was throwing him out of the apartment after calling him a useless bag of fleas.)

My mother's return to work coincided with summer vacation at my dad's college, and since he did not have to teach a class that year, he was given the job of being my primary caretaker while my mother wrangled with her imbecilic colleagues. At the time, she was working as a civil rights lawyer at a non-profit law firm, and while this sounded tolerable in theory, in actuality my mother found herself surrounded by incompetent morons, and very often she wanted to deport her own clients.

On her second day back after six months of battling wits with a three-year-old, she discovered that the people at her office were possibly even more insufferable than I. When my dad called that afternoon, informing her of our plans for the day, my mother was almost envious.

"We're at the zoo," my dad said gleefully.

"Yeah, well, so am I," said my mom. "Hang on --- Marshall, did you make the copies yet? I don't care if the photocopier is broken, figure a way to do what I told you or go work at Domino's. God, I have to teach these people to blow their own noses. What were you saying?"

"We're at the zoo. Well, we're not actually at the zoo. We're stuck in the pet store because of the rain, but I _told_ her it was the zoo."

"Already lying to the kid on the second day. You learn fast, rocket scientist."

"Tomorrow, I'm taking her to a museum and telling her it's Disneyland."

By the time school resumed in September, I was well-adjusted and thriving in the anarchic environment of Montessori preschool. Still, I had the biggest abandonment complex since Adam Rove, and I spent the first hour of school everyday wailing by the door. Even when I was left with people I trusted, my regular babysitters and my crazy aunt, I made it obvious that I preferred my parents and their no-bullshit, kick-'em-in-the-head style of parenting.

One evening, my parents left me with Joan while they went out to have dinner at a place where the entrees didn't come with a toy. I adored Joan --- everybody adores Joan, she has a way of making you like her even when she irks the shit out of you --- and saw her as a large, moving toy that made a lot of noise, but nevertheless, the minute my parents walked in through the door, I bounded toward them, consumed by a pure, unsullied baby love whose sheer force was so large enough to overwhelm me.

I head-butted my parents in welcome and when they picked me up, I covered them with sloppy, open-mouthed kisses. "Dude, chill out," my mother said. "We've only been gone for an hour."

Joan was slightly hurt by my sudden rejection of her. After all, she had spent the last hour putting on a puppet show for me, the main characters of which were a muffin tin, an empty Starbucks cup, and two oranges. "You know," she said to my parents, who were still staring in awe at this small creature who couldn't bear to be separated from them even for sixty minutes, "in ten years, she won't want anything to do with you. Enjoy it while it lasts."

"Your sister's right," my mother told my father that night, as he sat down to watch Mulan with me for the five hundredth time (it was one of the few Disney movies my mother approved due to its uplifting message of female empowerment).

"Huh?" My dad was busy stealing chunks of apple from my bowl and giving me a running-track commentary as he ate them ("Hmm, it's crunchy. You know why it's crunchy? Because of cellulose. Do you remember the molecular formula for cellulose?").

"She'll turn on us some day," my mom said.

"You're paranoid," said my dad. He continued his sermon on polysaccharides and my mother watched as I listened on, enraptured.

She tried to imagine me in ten or twenty years, grown up and rebelling against all the values she'd tried to instill in me. She pictured me as a varsity jock, a slave to corporate America, or worse yet, a Republican. She wondered, when that day finally came, if I would still remember riding on my father's shoulders on pretend journeys to glamorous destinations, the countless nights I fell asleep knowing my mother would be holding my hand.

* * *

For some reason, even the most well-meaning friends and relatives didn't quite grasp the concept that my parents weren't actually having an infant . When the news of my adoption spread through the grapevine, one of Dad's distant cousins from Chicago sent us a large, pink monstrosity which some refer to as a baby book. My parents appreciated the thought, but couldn't help but question, "What don't these people understand about our kid being way past the baby stage?" I had, by then, taken my first step, spoken my first word, and was way past my first birthday. My mother and father had no use for the book, which ended up on top of one of our many bookcases, gathering dust. 

Somehow, it inspired my mother, and during a sale at the drugstore, she purchased three composition notebooks, the kind with gray and white marble covers that students use in junior high.

The first book she used to write down all the stupid things people have said to her in the name of parenting advice. They ranged from the bizarre (Mrs. Wong, whose restaurant was number three on our speed dial, taught my mother how to perform an exorcism in case I was ever possessed by demons) to simply ignorant babble that came out of random people's mouths ("How much did you buy her for?").

The second book contained a series of undelivered correspondence from my mother to me, which I've never been allowed to read. When I was younger, Mom told me that I would be allowed to read it when I was sixteen. A few years later, she changed her mind and said I could read it when I turned twenty-one. She kept moving back the date, and the last time I checked, I'm not allowed to read it until after she died. "What if you outlive me, huh? What if I get killed during field hockey practice?" I once asked, to which she replied, "Sucks to be you." I don't have a clue as to what are in those letters, but I suspect that my mother, never the one censor herself, must have called me a couple of names that would have put seasoned truckers to shame.

The third book is my Book of Firsts. In it, my mother has recorded the highlights of my life until I entered adolescence, at which point I refused to let my parents know anything anyway. Normal parents record things like "First Day of School" or "First Piano Recital," but my parents documented events such as "First Science Fair" and "First Anarchist Meeting."

First Complete Sentence in English was directed to the Queen Bee of the popular clique in my kindergarten class. "_You_ shut up," I told her when she interrupted my turn for Show and Tell.

The honors of First Time Getting the Crap Beaten Out of Me was done by Elizabeth Rove, who, at five, was a year older than me and two heads taller, so it wasn't much of a fight. And in her defense, _I _started it --- I'd pushed her onto the ground when she wouldn't let me have a turn on her trampoline. In the following years, it would become nothing more than a running joke between the two of us.

First Parent-Inflicted Injury, however, remains as something that carries too much weight to be tossed around as an amusing anecdote.

My mother does not believe that I don't remember any of this, but the truth is, I really don't. As with all the other stories about my parents' lives, I've learned about it from various sources, including my parents themselves. I've also read the entry about it in my Book of Firsts, which is quite unhelpful, as it mostly says, "Ohmygod, what fucking moron thought it would be a good idea to give us a kid? Did they actually think we weren't going to accidentally kill her or something?"

(My parents bought What to Expect in the Toddler Years so that they could read it and do the polar opposite of everything it suggested. They were the type of people who would look completely befuddled if asked what method of parenting they were planning to employ. "What do you mean there are _methods_? She eats what we eat and sometimes we let her watch C-SPAN. We're not going by anything Dr. Phil says." To them, raising a child was a time-consuming and physically- and emotionally-draining activity, but it was one that did not require a high IQ. They were quite confident about their abilities, and it wasn't until this incident that my mother started doubting her competence as a parent and my father got all nervous and sweaty.)

The way the story goes, it was my mother's day off and we were folding and putting the laundry back into my parents' dresser. I've always had a strange, inexplicable fondness for laundry, one of the few things my grandma Helen and I have in common. My mother was glad to have somebody to do her work for her, but I was overly meticulous, and it could take me up to two hours to match stray socks to their mates. I wouldn't let her help me, squawking whenever she tried to hurry me along.

Between waiting for me to finish and wondering whether water would boil before I completed my task, my mom's state of mind was in a Friday-afternoon haze as she piled my dad's socks into the bottom drawer. Distracted by further concerns about her parents' impending visit, she slammed the drawer shut on my right hand. "Shit," she breathed as I let out a high-pitched scream. "Oh, God."

She picked me up and ran around in circles, completely at a loss as to how to get me to stop shrieking. The most she could think to do was call my father on his cell and cry into the voicemail, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." (My poor father was most baffled when he heard this message upon returning from his 3 PM class.)

Next, she phoned my aunt Joan, who was amazingly poised in comparison. Then again, Joan was experienced in getting injured in the most absurd ways. "Don't panic," Joan said. "Do you have ice?"

My mother ransacked the freezer for ice and came back with a package of frozen French fries and a box of Fudgsicles. She wrapped the frozen entree around my hand and shoved an ice cream bar into my mouth, as per Joan's instructions.

Ten minutes later, I had calmed down and was cheerfully sucking on the chocolate through hiccupped sobs. My mother, however, remained an emotional wreck. She took me to our neighbor, a professor emeritus of Harvard Medical School, who assured her that nothing was broken. "The bruises will fade in a few days," he bolstered, "but you're going to feel like a jackass for a long time."

I was not at all traumatized by the experience, and I only cried again when I discovered I could not hold my crayons with my swollen fingers. My father volunteered to color on my behalf, and held his tongue when I insisted that my trees must be purple and lacking in chlorophyll.

By the time my mother's parents showed up several days later, we had put the incident behind us. My grandparents had brought a gift, a giant Noah's Ark which my dad happily pointed out to me. "Look, Darwin's boat!" he exclaimed, and my grandparents had no idea how to respond to him. My mom, however, was charmed by his unintentional attempt at making them squirm. (For the record, I seriously thought that thing was called Darwin's Boat until I was in first grade. Thanks a lot for that, Dad. Thanks a whole lot.)

For dinner we went to an expensive kosher restaurant, with which I was not too impressed once I realized that the placemats were not for coloring. I voiced my displeasure regarding that and wriggled about until the food arrived.

My grandmother noticed when I had difficulty maneuvering the soup spoon with my good hand. "Is she left-handed?" she asked my mother.

It took a minute before my mom realized what my grandmother was talking about. "Oh, no. She just can't hold the spoon with her right hand right now."

The whole story came out. My parents told it carefully, toning the language down to a PG-13 level. The little details, the bag of French fries and the frantic phone calls, suddenly struck my parents as morbidly hilarious, the way some things have to be, or otherwise, they would eviscerate you with fear.

My mom ended by saying, "It was an accident, okay? And I still feel like absolute shit about it, which makes me wonder about the people who hurt their kids on purpose. What the hell is wrong with them?"

An uncomfortable silence came over the table, and the combination of what had been said and to whom it had been spoken made it unbearable for my mother to continue sitting at the table and pretending we were just another normal family, three generations blithely enjoying their dinner. Memories are strange little vermin; they allow you to relive simple pleasures, like flying a kite on a clear autumn night, but they also remind you that those who love you best are able to hurt you most.

My mother excused herself and grabbed me from my seat, mumbling something about going to the bathroom. We ended up sitting outside the back exit, where I pranced around and tried to grab at the falling snowflakes. My mother watched sullenly, and when I caught on to her distress, I climbed into her lap, as if I were hoping I might make her feel better by simply existing. She put my fingers to her eyes, and between the hitches of her breathing, she murmured an apology.

My father found us a few minutes later. He didn't ask what had happened, why she had run off. He didn't need to. He took off his jacket and wrapped it around my mother, and waited until she was ready before he took both me and Mom by our hands and led us back inside to face the rest of the world.


	5. Interlude: Joan

**AN:** For Jenny, who wanted to know what happened to Joan and Adam. And for Lar, who wanted to hear the Yakuza story.In other words, I am running out of wacky Luke/Grace anecdotes and will be euthanizing this baby soon. Many thanks to all of you who've encouraged me in this mad endeavor.

* * *

It's no secret that my aunt Joan is crazy. She is, as my father puts it so eloquently, a few valence electrons short of a full outer shell. Fortunately, she is crazy in a genial, inoffensive way that makes her mildly interesting, and not in a way that makes her likely to grace the cover of Schizophrenia Digest. 

Rumor has it that Joan talks to God.

Everybody in our immediate family knows about this, but for obvious reasons, we refrain from discussing it with others or even among ourselves. My uncle Kevin's revolving door of girlfriends we can joke about, but Joan's ability to converse with the divine remains untreaded territory. Part of this is due to our sensitivity toward mental health issues, but I suspect that perhaps somewhere deep within all of us, we really do believe that God talks to Joan.

For starters, it would account for a lot of my aunt's erratic behavior. She is known to take up a variety of random projects, which range from taking sudden road trips to the middle of nowhere to searching for rare coins in the bottoms of water fountains. Joan's life is a perpetual scavenger's hunt; she collects unusual experiences, pieces of people's lives, strange truths found in consoling desolate people in the dead of night.

That's another thing about Joan --- she has some sort of light-filled quality to her that attracts the lost, the lonely, the walking wounded. And she is always willing to help them in whatever misguided way she manages to come up with. She has this random passion toward small, easily overlooked things, this weird energy that makes her burn so bright, my grandmother Helen is often worried that Joan would self-implode.

All of this, in addition to her readiness to give us whatever we wanted for our birthdays, Elizabeth Rove and I became convinced when we were no more than seven or eight, that if there indeed was a God and if he had any common sense at all, Joan would naturally be the first one he talked to.

As founding members of Joan's fan club, Elizabeth and I were guilty of actively encouraging her lunacy. We volunteered to be her test subjects when she learned French cooking. We stayed up all night with her to watch foreign films with no subtitles, when somebody wanted her to familiarize herself with Tarkovsky. We dyed her hair and dyed it back when we saw that platinum blond was effectively advertising her mid-life crisis. When she disappeared to the North Pole, every other week Elizabeth and I sent her a box containing life's necessities: candy bars, tampons, gossipy magazines that had nothing to do with reality whatsoever.

Joan's sudden excursion to the North Pole was yet another one of the inexplicable things she did. As usual, she neglected to tell anybody about it until she reached the Arctic Circle, whereupon she called home and left a message on Grandma Helen's answering machine. "I'll be back in a couple of months," she shouted to make herself heard over the fuzzy background noise. "Don't worry."

My grandmother, of course, worried. She _still_ worries, regardless of the fact that even after years of flakiness, Joan has managed to stay in one piece. Grandma Helen is not unaccustomed to her middle child's anomalous behavior, but worry has always been Grandma's default mode of operation. "If she'd only settle down," she laments to whoever will listen to her. "Maybe then she'll stay out of trouble. And be happy, even." (At which point my mother will point out that this is a disgusting, chauvinistic old-fashioned school of thought. "Why does a woman need a man to be happy?" she is wont to demand, and somebody will say, "Um, Grace? _You're _married." To which she replies, "Yeah, but only so I'd get joint medical insurance and someone tall to change the light bulbs," which nobody believes, possibly not even my mother herself.)

So my grandmother continues to set Joan up on blind dates, all of which end up in disaster, frequently with Joan screaming at her mother to leave her alone. Sometimes I wonder if Joan is ever lonely. As far as I know, Joan has been engaged twice, the first time to a member of the Japanese mafia, and the second to a master's student in theology, with whom she got into an argument on the subway over the nature of God.

Some may find it surprising that the second engagement dissolved much more bitterly than the first. "Oh, that," Joan laughs whenever we ask her how she ended up almost marrying a member of the Yakuza. "It was just a little misunderstanding. See, I was supposed to help Masao show his father that he can fulfill his true nature without going into organized crime, but his dad took it the wrong way. It's not as melodramatic as you think. The Yamamotos are nice people. Really."

Why it didn't work out with Daniel, however, remains largely a mystery. "I don't want to talk about it," Joan says with a quiet hurt in her eyes that compels us to shut up. Over the years, we've come up with the conclusion that Daniel must have learned about Joan's secret, and considered it too much to handle. Or perhaps he couldn't find it in himself to believe her.

The closest semblance to a love life Joan has is her non-existent relationship with Adam Rove. These two, apparently, have been doing this strange dance for years. When Adam and his ex-wife were embroiled in their bitter divorce, Joan returned to Arcadia to give moral support and taught Elizabeth to double-dutch out all her anger. (This happened the summer I was seven. Elizabeth and I spent an entire month jumping rope while her parents and their lawyers marched in and out of court to battle for her soul.) When Joan landed herself a job as a curator for an art museum, Adam spent three months teaching her about art so that she would seem as though she knew what she was talking about.

Joan and Adam are too close, too comfortable with each other for any re-ignition of a romantic relationship; they are content to be friends, because they tried the dating thing way back in the Mesozoic era, and it resulted in a fiasco of catastrophic proportions. Most people don't realize this, so they often question us as to when Adam and Joan are going to give up and get back together. "It's never going to happen," Elizabeth would explain, rolling her eyes in exasperation. "They function better when they're apart. If they really do hook up, Christ, there will be so much misery I'm gonna need to take a shotgun to their heads as a humanitarian act."

* * *

Joan made her trip to the North Pole the year I turned sixteen. When she returned after five months, I had acquired my driver's license and was given the responsibility of picking her up at the airport. Her flight was to arrive at noon, but it was well past two o'clock and she still hadn't showed up. I called home to see if my father had heard anything from her, only to be surprised when Joan answered.

"What are you doing at my house?" I asked.

"I forgot where I put the keys to my house."

"I _have_ the keys to your house. What are you doing out of the airport at all? I'm supposed to pick you up!"

"I took a different flight."

"What? Why didn't you call?"

"You told me you lost your cell phone."

"And I also told you that I was using yours until you came back."

"Well, I'm not going to call my own number. That's just ridiculous."

I ordered Joan to stay put and wait for me to come back, and then I called my grandmother and confirmed that Joan was, indeed, still crazy.

To thank me for sending her the junk food, on which she had subsisted for the entire duration of her stay in the arctic, she took me out for dinner that night. By the time we left the restaurant, the clouds had gone from the color of half-and-half to that of a hematoma, and the sky was working on its way to a shade of inky blue.

"Weird," Joan said. She had spent five months in a land of endless light, and was no longer accustomed to the concept of nighttime. She kept looking up at the sky, nearly tripping off the curb and into traffic.

I took her arm and said, "Here, hold on. What, five months and now you're senile?"

"You are officially my least favorite niece," she snapped.

"Hey, I saved you from having to eat seal blubber for five months."

I ducked when she swatted me with a take-out menu, and when I stood up straight, I realized that we were standing eye to eye. All along I'd been under the assumption that Joan was taller than me, but now I saw that we were the same height. I studied her a little longer, searched her face for the traces of the girl she had been at sixteen.

"What's it like?" I asked as we waited to walked back to my father's ancient Toyota Prius, Polluter the Second.

"What's what like? Eating seal blubber?"

"No." I let a few moments sink between us, weighing down my words. "Talking to God."

Joan looked at me as if I were pulling some sort of practical joke on her, which, empirically speaking, was not improbable. Then she realized that neither of us were joking, and she chewed on her nail thoughtfully. "Talking to God," she said, "is a little bit like living in the North Pole. There's so much light that you can see things normally you wouldn't see, things you don't want to see. Things you want to hide from, but you can't, because of all that light. And maybe you end up seeing all the, say, spider webs in your igloo, but you also get to see good stuff, like the way the sun bounces off the water underneath the ice when you go ice fishing."

Divine clarity and divine madness are often only separated by a thin line. At that moment, I had no doubt at all that Joan is able to walk along it, arms spread out to keep her balance. If this had been a Hollywood movie, I would have had an epiphany. I would have stayed up all night, dwelling in the wisdom of my aunt's words, even if they were adorned with inappropriate metaphors.

But this was real life, and real life rarely allows for the seizing of such opportunities. So instead, I simply asked, "Did you really live in an igloo?"

"Yeah, right," she said. "I'd die without central heating. Hey, let's go to Dairy Queen."

* * *

When I was in ninth grade, Joan decided to take a Chinese language course. It didn't matter that she had no talent in languages whatsoever --- high school French had been four years of pain for both her and her teachers ---because _somebody_ wanted her to take it. She wanted to know if I wished to accompany her and spend my Saturday mornings learning how to count to ten with a bunch of elementary school kids.

"Not really," I told her. "Honestly, I think I'd rather go to temple."

"You never go to temple. Your mother doesn't even go to temple."

"But you don't make my mother take Chinese lessons with you."

Next, Joan asked Elizabeth Rove, who just snorted. "First of all, I'm in Maryland," said Elizabeth over the phone. "I'm not driving through three states just so I can defend you from a bunch of nine-year-olds. Look, I already have enough trouble remembering to capitalize my nouns in _Deutsch_. I don't need another language, thank you very much, especially one that doesn't have verb tenses."

"Whoa. It doesn't have verb tenses?" Joan asked, and it became obvious that she was no more than an overgrown teenager operating on a teenager's impulsivity. I felt so sorry for her that I gave in and registered for the course to keep her company.

Chinese class was, all in all, physical and emotional torture. We were enrolled in the beginner's section, which meant for eight months, we sat in Lilliputian chairs in the gymnasium of the cultural center, reciting a series of sounds that made little sense to either of us. I was the second oldest student in the class; Joan was the oldest. Everybody else had barely finished losing their baby teeth.

We were so hopelessly bad that even our young classmates pitied us. They made an effort to help us do our homework, and tried to teach us useful phrases that were mostly spoken in cartoons. As a result, Joan and I could say, "He attacked the armadillo with a light-saber and then disappeared into a wormhole," but ask us to describe the weather and we'd bang our heads on the table.

I quit once my eight months were up, but Joan persevered. By some stroke of luck, she had managed to pass the beginner's course and was wading through the intermediate section. On a lucky day, she could speak simple sentences like a baby on the eve of learning to talk, but beyond that, she made little progress.

Time and time again, Joan teetered on the verge of giving up. But a fellow classmate's encouragement or the sudden appearance of a smiley face sticker on her worksheet would boost her spirits, and she stumbled on, believing that with enough tenacity and goodwill from her teacher and the kids in her class, she would someday be able to master the language.

To know Joan is to know that faith exists. How else can one explain her refusal to surrender? And while we listened to her butcher the Chinese language and waited an extra hour every week for her to order eggrolls in Mandarin, my parents and I wondered if religious people behaved in the same way. If faith is really about trusting yourself and trusting somebody else bigger so much that you are willing to make a complete idiot of yourself and still be all right with it.

As Joan muddled her way through Intermediate and continued onto Advanced (my father had a theory that the teachers simply gave her a passing grade so that they wouldn't have to face her for another year), I learned Chinese by listening to my neighbor Lisa yell at her parents. "God, Mom, you are such a bitch," she often hollered in the universal tone taken by sulky, disenfranchised teenagers, regardless of what language they speak.

One afternoon, Joan came over while Lisa was borrowing the phone, speaking her native language with a fluidity that sounded as beautiful as poetry, and as incomprehensible as calculus.

"What's up with her?" Joan asked.

"She's breaking up with her boyfriend," I explained. "She has to use our phone because her parents don't know that she _has_ a boyfriend."

I went back to factoring polynomials as Joan eavesdropped on Lisa's conversation. Midway through a problem involving three variables, my aunt grabbed my pencil from me and waved her hands in an excited frenzy. "I know what she's saying!" She tried to contain her exhilaration in a whisper and failed miserably. "She's calling him a cheating scumbag. Ohmygod, I actually understand this. I understand every word she's saying."

As Lisa threatened to get a restraining order on her boyfriend, Joan listened on, breaking into a smile that could dry up the rain, the kind that Archimedes must have worn on his own face when he jumped out of the bath and ran down the street, shrieking "Eureka!" I was suddenly struck with a notion that if one could find a way to bottle up Joan's wonderment, her sheer sense of _being_, and sell it on Amazon, a lot of therapists would end up on the streets.

When Lisa finally hung up, muttering "that little asshole" (another phrase I was well-acquainted with, having heard it through the walls too many times), Joan reached over and tapped my friend on the shoulder. "Say it again," she begged, her voice filled with awe and wonder, as if she had just seen Lazarus walk out of his tomb, Moses part the Red Sea. "Please, say it again."


	6. Chapter 5

Around the same time my father graduated from high school, my uncle Kevin moved across the country with Lilly, his Girlfriend of the Moment (in this case, she would turn out to be Girlfriend of Three Years). He had sprung the news on my grandparents at the very last minute, knowing that Grandma, who somehow got the impression that Kevin was moving to California to live in a colony of surfer nuns, would do everything within her power to stop it. Afterreceiving consolation from my grandfather, my aunt, my father, and a Catholic priest, my grandmother finally resigned herself to the fact that she had to let her eldest child go. "And it's not like I'm going to be lying on the beach all day," Uncle Kevin reassured her. "I'm going to take some courses at Berkeley. Isn't that what you always wanted? For me to go to college, get my life together?"

My father was heading for MIT, and though my aunt Joan had been attending University of Maryland, which was only a couple hours away and close enough for her to unload her dirty laundry into her mother's outstretched arms every weekend, she was thinking of transferring to Northeastern. This would allow her to be nearer to her brother and her friends, but aggravating my grandmother's Empty Nest Syndrome was going to be an inevitable side effect.

In less than three weeks, my grandparents had gone from three kids in the house to _no_ kids in the house. With Adam Rove in New York City and my mother already in Massachusetts, there was a dire lack of protegees within a 10-mile radius of Grandma, who consequently catapulted headfirst into a mid-life crisis.

To ward off her loneliness, my grandmother contemplated returning to art school, before realizing that she and her husband had recently shelled out their entire lifesavings for their children's post-secondary endeavors. So she decided to take up smaller, less expensive interests. She did volunteer work at the community center, practiced tai chi, joined several book clubs, and went on weekend trips to the spa, basically doing everything short of auditioning for a role on _Desperate Housewives_.

When she grew tired of being massaged and exfoliated, she tried to convince my grandfather to travel. Grandpa Will was not interested in going anywhere, unless it was to someplace where he could play golf in peace. He passed his time by protecting and serving Arcadia (his day job) and cooking elaborate meals when he was free (his true passion). He often cooked so much food that he and my grandmother ended up eating leftovers for day. Once, looking at meatloaf that had been lunch, dinner, and lunch again, my grandmother broke down, pushing the plate away from her and sobbing into the mahogany tabletop. She understood that it was her children's job to grow up and she respected that, but this heartache, brought on by nothing other than the regular passage of time, was too great for her to bear.

Eventually, as my uncle majored in journalism and my parents broke up for the second or third time, my grandmother discovered the joy of redecorating. It was one of the few interests she shared with her husband, who had been lukewarm to the idea at first, but soon perked up when he was inspired to make a golf museum in the attic room of their house.

The attic room used to be my father's bedroom. I like to imagine that my grandparents had deliberated over which room to renovate, and finally decided on my father's only because they had no other choice. (Even now, it is difficult to entertain the thought that there are actual people in this world who don't regard my dad as the center of the universe, the proton in Bohr's model of the atom. My mother discredits my theory due to my inability to form an objective opinion.)

"Well, we need the guest room, so that's out of the question," I picture my grandmother saying.

My grandfather would nod in agreement. "Joan still visits from time to time, and she hates it when we move anything of hers."

"And we can't touch Kevin's room," Grandma would continue. "I guess that leaves Luke's. He never visits anyway, and he can stay with Grace if he does."

So the decision was made, and for months, my grandparents surrounded themselves with paint swatches and wallpaper samples, making regular excursions to Home Depot. They transformed my father's bedroom into half a studio for my grandmother's artwork, and half a showroom for my grandfather's assortment of golf memorabilia. One could find few pictures of my father as a child, but the renovation process was carefully documented in several photograph albums. (I exaggerate --- my grandparents are lovely, considerate people who are more than happy to stuff me full of lasagna.)

It was during those years that my father made semi-annual phone calls home, preferring to celebrate the holidays with his research rather than his parents. In the few times they actually exchanged words, my grandparents had failed to inform my father that his bedroom was now completely refurnished and repainted, and all his previous belongings were in the garage. And so my dad did not find out about any of this until almost a year later, when he returned home for a short visit and was asked to stay in the guest room.

It is a tribute to my father that he handled this with more grace that I could ever. When I first heard the details of this incident, I was furious. "How could they do that?" I stomped my foot in twelve-year-old rage. "And how could you just let them?" I warned my parents that if they ever even _thought_ about doing the same to my room when I left for college, I'd never forgive them. They assured me that in order to renovate my room, first they'd have to be able to _enter_ it, which I suppose was a sarcastic attempt to ask me to clean my room that, as usual, backfired.

The spring I was four, my father called my grandparents and told them that he and my mother were planning to return with me to Arcadia for Passover and Easter. "I hope the guest room's not taken," deadpanned my father, only to be met with an awkward silence.

"Actually, Joan's coming back and so is Kevin, with his new girlfriend. Adam's in an argument with his wife so he's here for a few days. Do you think you can stay with Grace's family?"

Given a choice between staying with my mother's parents and pitching a tent in the Girardi backyard, my mother would choose the Girardi backyard every time. But I was not an outdoors kind of girl, and so my mom called up the Rabbi and gave him her list of demands.

"Look, if a drop of wine touches her lips while my kid's there --- I don't care if it's only that Manischewitz stuff --- if she drinks in front of my daughter, we're gone. That quick. And then you two can hang onto your Baby Einstein videos because you aren't coming near any of us again, do you hear me?" My mother's hands were still shaking when she hung up the phone. She tried to laugh it off, and I remember her saying to my father, "I forgot. She doesn't drink in front of other people's kids. She just drinks in front of her own."

The actual seder I don't recall very well, just that there could have been less damage done at a demolition derby. I did not appreciate the unleavening of the house, especially since we had been over at the Girardi house the night before, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the commercialist accomplishments of Cadbury. Told to ask the Four Questions, I openly wept at having to speak in public, and the next morning, when my mom washed the breakfast dishes, she discovered that there was more than just Minute Maid in my grandmother's glass.

My mother had us out the door in ten minutes.

Over at my other set of grandparents', we were once again swept into the background as people bustled about. My aunt Joan had arrived with a new friend, Hugo, and fortunately for all of us Hugo had not been found on the streets or in the outpatient clinic of a psychiatric facility. My grandmother spent most of the long weekend chatting up Uncle Kevin's girlfriend ("I think she's the one," Grandma said afterward, even though she could barely remember the woman's name), and my grandfather's eyes glazed over when he asked my dad what kind of research he was doing at the moment, prompting Dad to delve into detailed explanation.

My father, as he always did, stopped to visit his former bedroom before we left. He marveled at how it had been utterly transformed into something he could not recognize. Gone were the fish tank, the posters, the racks of test tubes and graduated cylinders. "It's like I've never even lived here before," he said, with a slightly resentful admiration.

I look back and realize how strange it must be for my parents to return to a place they could no longer call home. Our bi-annual trips to Arcadia were always considered as physically and emotionally exhausting as Odysseus' forty-year trek, but for whatever reason, we still took them. My aunt Joan used to tease, claiming that my parents were too attached to the biology closet to stay way from it for too long (another inside joke I do _not_ want to know about), while Iwas of the belief that my parents were masochists.

Now that I am older and have gone through that painful, frustrating period of adolescence wherein I regarded my parents as gigantic albatrosses around my neck, I understand that to love somebody is to know that the person you love may disappoint you, yet you risk it anyway. Because you have no other choice, because it's necessary for Darwinistic evolution, because there is something thicker than blood and water that ties you to each other, an invisible umbilical cord of feeling that keeps you from straying too far.

With the Girardis and the Polonskys, that is quite often the case, yet for reasons unknown, we continue to give them the benefit of doubt. To do the same thing again and again, hoping to see different results --- Freud once defined this as insanity. My parents, however, call it family.

* * *

The same year the university sent my father on an exchange program to London, my mother quit her job at the firm. The two events were entirely unrelated, and my mother wanted to wring the necks of whoever thought she'd given up her career to follow her husband across the Atlantic. "I don't follow anybody _anywhere_," she would tell them (it should be noted that she said the same thing to the zealous converts who knocked on our door and asked us to join them on the path toward Jesus Christ). The truth is, after years of wrangling the corrupt justice system, she had had enough. She decided she would simply sit back and wait for it to self-destruct. 

My father, on the other hand, was as dedicated to his work as ever, even when half of his students showed up to class hungover or high. For every one of these students, there was another who understood the beauty of quantum mechanics, and my father was never the one to deny them the pleasure of talking non-stop about it for an hour and a half.

My dad was used to traveling to various places around the world to deliver lectures or attend conferences. These trips usually lasted for no more than a week or two and my mother and I would accompany him, if the timing was right and the meeting not in one of the red states. But never before had my father been posted overseas for such a long stretch of time, and we were suddenly faced with a choice: should my mother and I follow him to England, or should we observe the Newton's First Law and stay where we were?

I voted to go, as I was in love with the way the British spoke. British slang, as I saw it, sounded a lot more elegant than American colloquialisms, and I spent hours practicing it. "Derrick O'Connor was being a real tosser today," I'd announce as I came home from school. "Do I have to start saying 'bloke' instead of 'dude?'"

My mother did not share my enthusiasm. My father had to help her compose a list of pros and cons of moving to England for a year. It read:

**Cons:** monarchy, long, bloody history of imperialism, Hugh Grant  
**Pros:**Guy Fawkes Day

In the end, we decided to go, because once, when he had to give a speech on non-dissociative algebra at Caltech, my father had missed us with a pang so physical that he almost threw up in front of his audience. My mother had laughed at him, and afterwards, whenever he took another trip, she would remind him to pack a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. There was no question: those Greek sisters had used our fates for a game of cat's cradle, and we would spend our remaining lives in a tangle, squabbling over our differences.

So we handed our house keys to Joan, pleaded her not to destroy anything while we were gone, and hopped on a plane, heading toward the foggiest, dampest year in our lives.

My father taught an advanced course with some unpronounceable mathematical name, which meant for three days a week, he sat cross-legged on a desk, solving 5000-year-old math puzzles that had been scratched on the walls of Egyptian tombs in the company of younger but equally compulsive geeks.

In the movies, you often see geniuses scribbling Xs and Ys madly on a chalkboard, filling walls and walls with formulas and equations, never stopping for a drink of water or a sojourn to the bathroom. Reality, however, is nothing like Good Will Hunting. My father's classrooms were equipped with white boards, the smell of dry-erase markers gave my dad a headache, and he paused occasionally for a drink of coffee or a round of whatever role-playing game he had on his laptop.

At the end of the day, he would return to our apartment ("Flat!") and while my mother and I tried to watch television ("The telly!"), he would prattle on about the progress he had made in class. If Mom and I could be arsed to do so, we would listen in bemusement, fully appreciating that he was of a complete different species from us. My father had a way of talking about science did not make him annoying, just _himself_; his psychobabble was so much a part of him that we accepted it the way we accepted Joan's inherent quirkiness.

Living in the country that had birthed William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and J. K. Rowling, my father was convinced that he, too, could write a book. He was inspired to write a biography on Dietrich Steinholz, his mentor, a forgotten and unacknowledged forefather of string theory.

"You want to write something long and boring that nobody will ever read?" my mother asked. "What do you know, you've already done that. It's called your dissertation."

"I could make it interesting," my father defended. "Hell, even Friedman wrote a book."

My father's best friend had, several years earlier, written a detailed history of electrical engineering that was about as interesting as a VCR manual, and made just about as little sense.

Directly telling my father this was a terrible idea had failed to register any sense into him, so my mother took to snickering as he agonized over the writing process. "Tell James Joyce it's his turn to empty the dishwasher," she would tell me snidely.

My father gave up after several weeks and decided to leave writing to my mother. "Grocery lists and physics labs I can handle," he said. "The rest is up to you."

My mother was the writer in the family, but we were never allowed to talk about it. She did her writing in spiral notebooks she kept locked away, and if we ever tried to read any of it, she made it clear that she would personally remove our corneas. The only poem I've ever read of hers is _Sewer Walking_, and that happened only because my third-grade teacher had deemed my poetry assignment unacceptable. My poem did not rhyme. When she heard this, my mother stormed into my teacher's office and accused her of restricting my creativity. "So Seuss is a better poet than Wordsworth?" she demanded.

Later, she showed me the poem she had written in high school, which did very little to make me feel better, considering that _it_ rhymed. "That's not the point," my mom told me. "The point is, you are better than this sorry excuse of a public school system."

During the first few months in England, my mother found so much to snark about that she wrote a series of essays and rants. They caught the interest of one of her former professors, who referred her to an agent, who, in turn, wanted to publish them. My mother ignored the agent's calls for several weeks, insisting that the publishing world was just as corrupt and capitalist as the legal system.

"But that would be so cool," my aunt Joan enthused over the phone. "It'd probably be a New York Times bestseller. You'd be like Dan Brown, except you'd actually be good!"

"Any idiot can write a book these days and sell it," said my mom. Which, judging from the books that lined the shelves of Barnes and Nobles and its European equivalents, had some degree of truth in it.

Perhaps out of boredom, or perhaps because the agent had sworn in blood that he would not sell her out to corporate conglomerates, my mother eventually relented. She went back and edited a collection of her old writings, an exercise that made her want to hurl everything into a bonfire. She was most underwhelmed about the whole ordeal. "For God's sake, half of it is a bunch of pissed-off rants about the evils of grad school," she would say, and people thought she was being modest when she meant every word of it. "You guys are making way too big a deal out of this, and no, you can't read it until I'm finished. I don't care who the hell you think you are."

Not even my father and I were allowed a preview, and if we dared to ask, the response was, "Write your own damn book." (I tried, but at the age of nine, I was more interested in the sharpening my pencils than in the actual writing itself.) Writing, you see, is an intensely private matter, and to show it to the world with your name attached to it means taking a giant leap of faith, something which my mother was wary of doing.

One evening in January, I lay on the living room floor, watching the DVD of the timeless classic, _Mean Girls_ ("Brutally accurate portrayal of the high school socio-political system," my mother endorsed). My father was sitting on one end of the couch, chewing on the cap of an orange highlighter as he read through the latest issue of one of his scientific journals, and my mother was curled up on the other, crossing out and rearranging the words on her fifth or sixth or seventeenth draft.

A third of the way through the movie, my concentration was disrupted as my mother let out a chuckle. I wasn't sure if she had caught an awkward typo, or if what was written had brought back a ridiculous memory. She leaned over, and against all expectation, showed my father what she had been working on. She rested her chin on his shoulder, and waited until he got to the right part and started laughing as well. My father carried on reading, reaching up with one hand to touch the side of my mother's face. She shifted closer until they were pressed cheek to cheek, and I was suddenly aware that this was one of those small, unhurried moments of affection that go so easily unnoticed, a split second so intimate that it could end wars.

I felt like an intruder for simply being in the same room as they were, so I turned off the television and went into my bedroom. I picked up my pen and began to write.

-----

FIN

-----

**end notes:** and so it ends not with a bang but a whimper. I figured I needed to stop before living in the bowels of Asia renders me incapable of forming coherent sentences in English. Also, I'm bored.

Again, thank you for reading and sticking with me through this. It's over; go home.


End file.
